_Journal of World-Systems Research_ Volume 1, Number 2, 1995 
                 http://jwsr.ucr.edu/
                    ISSN 1076-156X



           CATCHING THE BUS FOR GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT:
                GERSCHENKRON REVISITED


                  Myron J. Frankman
                Department of Economics
                  McGill University
             Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7 Canada
                 inmf@musicb.mcgill.ca
              Copyright (c) 1995 Myron Frankman

     In a lengthy career a scholar is likely to encounter
millions of ideas and phrases relating to her field of
inquiry.  The overwhelming majority of these notions
will find their way directly into deep storage,
unrecoverable even through the efforts of the most
skilled practitioner of hypnosis.  A very few, seemingly
innocuous, clever verbal images or turns of phrase, will,
almost inexplicably, trigger a sympathetic response  and
will remain free-floating near the surface. These
concepts seem to be simultaneously question marks and
exclamation marks.  As they defy the customary
classification,  we may for many years not be able to
integrate them into our ever-changing jigsaw
construction of social reality.  And yet they persist,
reminding us that although we believe we had completely
assembled the picture, there are still some unused
pieces lying on the table, which seem to belong to the
puzzle at hand and seem to be too important to neglect.
These ideas can be thought of as intellectual icebergs:
blips on the horizon which seem inconsequential, but

                          [Page 1]

which have the potential for sinking the iron-clad
paradigms which rule the seas of thought.
     An image that I want to focus on here I first
encountered in the work of Alexander Gerschenkron while
in graduate school in the early 1960s.  In a 1962
collection of essays, _Economic Backwardness in
Historical Perspective_, Gerschenkron reflected on the
historical changes in  sources of funding for
industrialization (which he equated at the time with
development). (1)  He likened the spurt of
industrialization to a bus that "comes at odd hours and
can be missed" (Gerschenkron 1962: 363).  I shall
consider later the applicability of Gerschenkron's
approach to funding sources in today's context, but first I
would like to pursue his analogy.   I shall ask whether
parts of the Third world have already missed the bus and
what might be done to accelerate the early arrival of a
suitable conveyance which will, at the very least, appear
to be headed in the direction of sustainable global
development.  On the other hand, there is a complication
posed by the arrival of a recently refurbished bus which
proclaimed itself to be going our way, but which clearly
has misrepresented its destination.  Gerschenkron
doesn't address  that particular problem.   Once we are on
the wrong bus there appears to be less and less chance to

                           [Page 2]

disembark with each passing kilometer.  At first it was
merely the driver who ignored our shouts, now the
passengers, both holders of  choice seats and those
standing in the rear,  are angrily glaring at us and
chanting TINA --  "there is no alternative."
     I shall refer to  four "buses" -- four different paths:
today's dominant path of national competitiveness and
the path of ethnic strife, the latter often being an
outcome, rather than an intended course of events.   Then
I shall consider the buses which we have missed (or, if
you prefer, paths that we have neglected): the bus for
global social justice  and the bus for democratic
development.

                        A Wayward Bus?

     The bus we have all boarded -- industrial countries,
developing countries and transitional ones -- is that of
national competitiveness.  Some countries have boarded

of their own volition; others have had to be coaxed.
Although the phrase may be new, the notion is akin to
that which guided the  mercantilists. The implications
for the common person are little different today from
what they were when Thomas Mun provided a list of
appropriate policies in the early 17th century.  The

                          [Page 3]

people were to be frugal in their food and clothing lest
they reduce the exportable surplus and were certainly to
avoid the consumption of imports.  Edgar Furniss spelled
out very forcefully over seven decades ago what national
competitiveness meant for the common person in 18th
century England in _The Position of the Laborer in a
System of Nationalism_.  His chapter on "The Doctrine of
the Utility of Poverty," contains the following passage
from a volume written in 1771 by Arthur Young:

          Every one but an idiot knows that the lower
     classes must be kept poor or they will never be
     industrious; I do not mean, that the poor of England
     are to be kept like the poor of France, but the state
     of the country considered, they must (like all
     mankind) be in poverty or they will not work (Cited
     by Furniss 1920: 118).

     Today the language is slightly different.  The key
phrase is "flexible labor markets."  The association of
such flexibility with poverty and unemployment tends to
be swept under the rug, as markets are expected to be
self-equilibrating.
     In a recent article in _Foreign Affairs_, Paul Krugman
described competitiveness as a dangerous obsession,

                           [Page 4]

which distorts policy on a wide range of issues, many
with little direct bearing on international trade.  As
Krugman puts it :  ". . . if an economic doctrine is flatly,
completely and demonstrably wrong, the insistence that
discussion adhere to that doctrine inevitably blurs the
focus and diminishes the quality of policy discussion
across a broad range of issues . . ." (Krugman 1994:
42).
     It is wrong, in part, because a nation is not a
corporation  with a clearly identifiable bottom line.  A
more general reason why such an approach is wrong is
that made by Ursula Franklin in her 1989 CBC (Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation) Massey Lectures in her
critique of what she labels the "production model":

     Production models are perceived and constructed
     without links into a larger context.  This allows
     the use of a particular model in a variety of
     situations.   At the same time such an approach
     discounts and disregards all effects arising from
     the impact of the production activity on its
     surroundings.  Such _externalities_ are considered
     irrelevant to the activity itself and are therefore
     the business of someone else.
     . . . production models now become almost the only

                          [Page 5]

     pattern of  guidance for public and private thought
     and action. (Franklin 1992: 27, 31).

Of course, the fact that an approach is demonstrably
wrong may not be evident to many observers.   And those
who raise their voices in opposition may succeed in doing
little more than preaching to the convinced.
     As Krugman observes, policies aimed at national
competitiveness are essentially confrontational, an
unsuitable approach to the conduct of affairs in a rapidly
globalizing  society.  The focus on competitiveness
carries with it a we-they approach to the world.  In
times of economic strife, "they" -- the adversaries --
are the ones who are robbing our jobs. "They" are not
only foreign countries, but minorities or even majorities
(women, to identify an obvious majority) in our midst.
Violence towards the "other" is not uncommon in
circumstances in which jobs disappear and real incomes
shrink.
     The doctrine of national competitiveness may
manifest itself in either a free market format -- an even
more dangerous obsession in its pure, unmitigated form -
-, an industrial policy format, or an admixture of the
two:  subsidies to capital and flexible markets for labor.

                          [Page 6]

     In the early 1960s Albert Hirschman identified
balance-of-payments difficulties as the frequent object
of the privileged attention of policy-makers in the Third
World (Hirschman 1965: 301-309).  Today, external
payments seem to be the privileged problem throughout
the world.  Every country seems to be striving to run
either a trade surplus, a balance of payments surplus or
both. Clearly, though, not every country can be a net
earner of foreign exchange.  Is the universal quest for an
external payments surplus not one of the underpinnings
of some of our problems in today's world of increasingly
integrated global markets with largely uncoordinated
national decision making?  Does this not pose a greater
danger today than it did during the Great Depression of
the 1930s?  And are not some of the same destructive
manifestations becoming visible, as a rereading of Karl
Polanyi's _The Great Transformation_ (Polanyi 1957)
would remind us?
     Where does development fit into this?  As
competitiveness and the downsizing of the public sector
is the name of the game in both the north and the south,
most governments are today bent on policies which are
intended to  permit them to pay their own way
internationally.  Indeed they have no choice but to do so.
As a recent editorial in the Montreal Gazette put it with

                          [Page 7]

regard to Hungary:  "The Socialists may have a stronger
conscience than their predecessors, but they are likely to
find that economic realities curb good intentions"
("Hungarians . . .," 1994: B2).  As simultaneous
payments surpluses in all countries are a logical
impossibility, many must of necessity fail and those who
"win" do so at a cost.  But nations don't "win" -- some
people and organizations within them win and some lose.
And even the monetary gainers may perceive that their
personal security has diminished.  In the economist's
static welfare model, my gain and your loss can be
simply tallied up and the matter is settled.(2)  In reality,
gainers who perceive threats to their security may
clamor for the state to take a hard line against those
who dissent about the outcome of the process. National
strategies in an integrated world tend to generate an
excess of losers over winners in both the winning and the
losing countries.  The temper of the moment is one in
which the few winners are neither disposed to share
with the community, be it local, national or global, nor
are compelled to do so to any appreciable extent.
     An even more serious objection to the concept of
"national competitiveness" is that it is a smokescreen to
assure that gains accrue to capital, which increasingly is
transnational, with little loyalty to place.  "National

                          [Page 8]


competitiveness" is a convenient label to rally support
for policies that tend to benefit neither the common
person nor governments (states) that have acted in
support of this slogan.  In the name of national
competitiveness, gains accrue, which under the new
rules of the game, can be transferred in a nanosecond to
almost any place on the globe. The Articles of Agreement
of the International Monetary Fund made provision only
for the abolition of restrictions over current payments,
they did not envision the Fund playing its current role
together with the World Bank of speeding the removal of
the last protections against casino capitalism.  In our
world of hyper-capital mobility, a government that
deigns, for example,  to either raise taxes or increase its
budget deficit is quickly brought to heel.
     Robert Gilpin spoke of the tension between national
welfare capitalism in a non-welfare international
capitalist world (Gilpin 1987: 60).  Today, welfare
states are on the defensive as the common person,
smitten by a false consciousness that the interest of the
national community will be fostered by serving the
interests of finance capital, joins the competitiveness
chorus in calling for remaining social programs and
social safeguards to be decimated.


                          [Page 9]

                 The Bus of Ethnic Strife

     Robert Kaplan stirred much controversy with an
article in the February 1994 issue of _The Atlantic
Monthly_ suggesting that national breakdown and the rise
of private police forces lies ahead (Kaplan 1994).  Casual
empiricism suggests that  one of the fastest growing
economic activities in the north and the south is the
private security business.  This seems to be a clear case
of the lack of an ounce of public prevention leading to
many pounds of private "cure" for those able to afford a
modicum of protection from thievery, but not from major
social breakdown.
     Kaplan argued that the experience of Sierra Leone
provided a foretaste of things to come.  Michael Ignatieff
raises the same concern in his _Blood and Belonging:
Journeys Into the New Nationalism_:  "The key narrative
of the new world order is the disintegration of nation
states into ethnic civil war; the key architects of that
order are warlords; and the key language of our age is
ethnic nationalism" (Ignatieff 1993: 2).
     Is the bus of ethnic strife the one to which we must
transfer when the bus of national competitiveness and
its associated policies have run their course
unsuccessfully?  In the face of severe economic

                          [Page 10]

downturn the security of minorities is at risk both in
countries whose ethnic nationalism  allowed for
contingent "toleration" of minorities, as well as in
countries where civic nationalism had moved society
from tolerance of the "other" to acceptance and respect,
but apparently not as far as oneness (witness the
continuing furor in Canada over the wearing of turbans in
various settings).  Referring to Los Angeles in 1992,
Ignatieff observes that when the rule-enforcing
capacities of the nation state break down, even
"cosmopolitan multi-ethnic cities have as great a
propensity for ethnic warfare as any Eastern European
country" (Ignatieff 1993: 9).

                    The Bus We Missed

     The Great Depression and the Second World War
spawned considerable reflection on global organization
as a means of spreading economic and political security
and social justice.  Systematic consideration of global
organization was quite commonplace during that period.
Building the postwar world engaged the imagination not
only of economists, but of political thinkers and
statesmen.  Their views had moved well beyond Woodrow
Wilson's recipe for disaster which gave pride of place to

                          [Page 11]

ethnic divisions -- enshrined in his "Fourteen Points" as
the self-determination of peoples.  As I give you a
sampler of some of these ideas, you might turn your
imagination to what might have been the circumstances
of the Third World today if social justice had won the
day rather than massive support for security forces
which effectively deterred both democracy and
development and still represents a threat to free
expression.
     The following observation in a chapter entitled "If We
Own the Future" by Max Lerner, from which many would
recoil today, was part of the discourse of the early 1940s:

     The solution is likely to lie . . . in a pattern of
     regional economic collaboration within a larger
     pattern of world economic control, all this . . .
     within some framework of world federation.
          But this too would involve a qualification of
     sovereignty. . . .  But as for the small nations, how
     can they be conceived of as losing anything by the
     partial surrender of what they never had fully? It
     is somewhat reminiscent of the surrender of the
     individualism of the worker when he receives a
     Social Security Card. . . . The truth is that the

                          [Page 12]

     small states, and large as well, will have to
     surrender part of the _fiction of sovereignty_ in
     order to get more of the reality of free national
     action (Lerner 1941: 74-75, emphasis added).

     Sumner Welles, United States Under-Secretary of
State from 1937 to 1943, wrote in _The Time for
Decision_ in 1944:  "No international organization can
conceivably survive unless it is supported by the opinion
of free men and women throughout the world.  That
support will not be forthcoming unless the new
international organization assures them all of . . . liberty
-- not an overlordship  . . ." (Welles 1944: 374).
     Discussion of global taxation and income
redistribution appeared in the war-time writings of Jan
Tinbergen, James Meade and Gunnar Myrdal, all eventual
winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Tinbergen, for
example, in 1945 had spoken of the appropriate level for
government action, judging that ". . . curtailment of
national sovereignty with regard to economic policy" is
required "if a more stable and prosperous social system
is to be realized in the world . . ."  (Tinbergen 1944: 164). 
Tinbergen spoke in 1945 about "a distribution as
just as possible among 1. persons and classes, and 2.
nations" as being one of the aims of international

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economic relations (Tinbergen 1944: 17). In what might be termed
a "World Peace through World Economy"  approach,
Tinbergen observed that the aims of "as few conflicts as
possible, both at home and abroad" and "as much freedom
as possible for the parts" would likely be met to the
extent that distribution is just and production as large
and as stable as possible (Tinbergen 1944: 17-18).   Tinbergen
was but one voice among many calling for a global
system far more extensive than the Bretton Woods twins
which commanded the support of the United States.
Recall that Tinbergen's work was published after the
1944 Bretton Woods agreement.  Clearly, he perceived
the agreement as having only begun the task of global
economic management.

     Global Organization:  The Never-Ending Highjack

     No, the world was not yet ready for global
redistribution or global federation in the 1940s and
1950s.  But until U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy appeared
with  his anti-Communist witchhunt, people had at least
been earnestly exploring these ideas.  The persecution of
those with independent opinions during the McCarthy era
drove any serious consideration of global social justice
or even mention of it off the agenda  for over four

                          [Page 14]

decades.   One-world thinking ceased to be discussed, not
merely during the period of Congressional inquiries in
the early 1950s, but virtually to this day.
     One of the most prominent of the early targets of
McCarthy's witchhunt was Owen Lattimore, then Director
of the School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins.
An attack on a scholar of Lattimore's standing initially
led many to practice self-censorship.  Eventually we
acquired an ability to see only those solutions amenable
to the independent actions of nation-states.
     I shall give but one example of the preoccupation that
arose in the academic community when McCarthy's
campaign against Lattimore began in 1950, accompanied
as it was by banner headlines.  Adda Brozeman of Sarah
Lawrence College wrote the following to Senator Millard
Tydings, the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee's  subcommittee to inquire into Senator
McCarthy's allegations of Communist  penetration of the
State Department:

          As a college teacher who began her career ten
     years ago with considerable enthusiasm, I now
     spend most of my energy fighting frustration and
     futility in the face of the deliberate attack on all

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     values of research and all honest processes of
     forming one's opinion which is implicit in the
     treatment up to now accorded to Dr. Lattimore.
     There seems indeed little use in one's efforts to
     uphold and develop among students standards of
     integrity and independence, if a man known for
     learning and intellectual integrity like Mr.
     Lattimore can be subjected to the ignominious
     procedures involved in this case (Cited in
     Lattimore 1950: 172-73).

Needless to say, the hesitancy about speaking freely that
was generated by  attacks such as that on Lattimore was
intensified when the House Un-American Activities
Committee asked for and received course reading lists
from universities (Diamond 1992: 121-22).
     For ideas as sweeping as those of global social
justice, global federation, global redistribution and
global democracy to take hold would have required a
lengthy period of discussion and growing familiarity
with the concepts.  Academics could have worked out
their theoretical models, businessmen might have seen
the advantages, school children would have had to study
the history of the idea, debates would have taken place.
Instead most of us continue to imagine that national

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sovereignty works and is the best safeguard for the
well-being of all peoples.

                  The Bus for Democracy

     We missed not one, but two busses: one that we
missed might have led us to a system of global public
finance.  The other might have created effective
democratic governments in the Third World.  Both buses
were turned aside by the Cold War. During the Cold War
our commitment to democracy fell prey to the "anti-
politics machine."  Our understanding of the dynamics of
democratic processes was apparently so superficial that
we were willing to embrace "anti-politics" -- that is,
the quest for efficient outcomes, even if the rights of
citizens were trampled in the process. (3)  Alas,
democracy is not something that one learns to value
through the customary educational obstacle course, but
rather is a process that one grows to appreciate through
experiences in working with others in a context where
participants are given voice.  Indeed, many institutions 
within our democratic societies are still
essentially anti-democratic and at risk of becoming
more so.  To quote Ursula Franklin once again:  "When work
isn't shared, the instruments of cooperation -- listening,

                          [Page 17]

taking note, adjusting -- atrophy like muscles that are
no longer in use"  (Franklin 1992: 51).
     We have provided extravagant financial and technical
support and extensive  encouragement to the world's
most repressive dictators in return for their paradoxical
pledge of allegiance to the "Free World."  If we had
followed the path advocated by Lattimore, rather than
that onto which we were led by McCarthy and many
others who lacked any real appreciation of democratic
institutions, the record of the past half century might
well have been very different.  For example, Lattimore
wrote in 1941:  "We must have a policy that does not
limit us to defending the possessions of the
democracies, but pledges us to support and spread
democracy itself" (Lattimore 1950: 43).
     In 1950, just four weeks after his last hearing before
the Senate Subcommittee, Lattimore completed the
manuscript of _Ordeal by Slander_, a work which is at
once a wake-up call to the dangers of McCarthy's tactics
and a spirited defense of democracy.  In it Lattimore
stated:

     Beyond the shores of our own country, all the many
     constructive possibilities of our foreign policy are
     being frozen by the cold war.  The freeze is already

                          [Page 18]

     so deep that nothing is left of foreign policy but
     the cold war itself.  And yet it should be obvious
     that the cold war offers no solution either for our
     own problems or for the problems of the world
     (Lattimore 1950: 226).

     With the end of the Cold War the democracy bus has
finally been pushed out of the garage.  It would appear,
however, that neither the steering wheel nor the brakes
function properly.  We urge free elections, on the one
hand, but insist on a set of policies that, in the absence
of substantial supporting financial flows, create
conditions which virtually condemn fledgling
governments to failure.
     Unable as we seem to be to shift the focus of our
analyses, we either persist in using models that are in
Kenneth Boulding's words "consistent, clear and wrong"
(Cited by Franklin 1992: 32), or we offer ad hoc
counsel at variance both with our theory and with what
we should have learned from historical experience, had
we paused long enough to consider the historical record.
The counsel we offer to the South is a variation of that
which we inflict on ourselves:  the state is to be
downsized, markets are to be freed, including the import
market, and labor markets are to be made flexible.

                          [Page 19]

     As a graduate student in the 1960s, I never once
imagined that Keynesianism, both baby and bath water,
would be unceremoniously thrown out; yet that is what
has happened.  Progressive taxation is in retreat, social
safety nets are shrinking, and in a reversal of what Karl
Polanyi saw as the historical relationship, society (or
what is left of it) has come to be _embedded_ in the
economy (Polanyi 1957: 43-55).  Henry J. Aaron  has
offered the following comment on today's economic policy
advisors:  "The stubborn unwillingness of so much
behavior to fit our models leads to the wry
characterization of economists as people who, upon
discovering that reality and theory conflict conclude that
the evidence is mixed" (Aaron 1994: 19).  Moreover,
the committed free marketeer would confidently predict
that reality will continue to give ground.
     Today, everyone talks about globalization, but it
seems we have all adopted what the political scientists
call the realist model.  One author after another explores
the limits of policy measures in either the industrial
countries, the transitional countries or the developing
countries, and either confidently proclaims that market
processes will solve all ills or is unable to go beyond
hand-wringing about these being particularly difficult
times.  For example, a recent article about the growth of

                          [Page 20]

the working poor in the United States, after observing
that "most of us are only a restructuring, a re-
engineering, a firing, a major illness, or a divorce away
from joining them" (Beatty 1994: 66), concluded
despairingly:  "what we have here, in short, is a circular,
self-generating crisis for which it is hard to come up
with convincingly efficacious solutions" (Beatty 1994: 78).
     In the north, where the play of democratic interests
has prevented a full implementation of economic
liberalism, consequences have nonetheless been severe.
This same set of policies applied in many a Third World
setting is a recipe for disaster, not for the successful
launch of a rebirth of civil society.
     At least one additional recommendation is offered to
the developing countries with the intention of trying to
assure that they earn the foreign exchange necessary to
service their external debt:  they are advised to maintain
depreciated real exchange rates.   This is curious
counsel.  On the one hand, it is at variance with the
belief of free marketeers  that purchasing power parity
holds in the long run, i.e.,  exchange rate changes and
price inflation must proceed at similar rates.  On the
other hand, the counsel completely neglects the
distributional consequences on the bulk of the population
of continuous currency depreciations.  Moreover, we

                           [Page 21]

should have learned from the competitive devaluations of
the 1930s that, while one country may succeed with this
strategy, all cannot be successful.

                         Conclusion

     Enough!  Is there no relief from this bleak landscape?
I offer you today the same range of alternatives that
were being discussed in the 1940s.  My contention is that
integrated global markets require nothing less than the
adoption of mechanisms to foster global social justice.
By and large these efforts will fall far short of the mark
by any objective standard; some degree of inequality will
always be with us, as will concentrations of power.  But
stable global markets and a peaceful global society are
likely to require transfers far beyond the never attained
official development assistance target of 0.7 percent of
the gross product of the industrial countries.
     When Alexander Gerschenkron considered the
financing of earlier economic transformations, he pointed
to an historical succession of funding sources:  private
accumulations of wealth in the 18th century, the banks
in the 19th century and the state in the 20th century.
What is to be the source of funds in today's context?
Financing the economic transformation of poor societies

                          [Page 22]

in a world of freely mobile capital requires nothing less
than the action of a global public authority.  The free
flow of private capital imposes severe limits on the
policy options of most states and especially the poorest.
We have long recognized the need for transfers within
nations.  Now that our "nation" is effectively the planet,
the list of locations and the numbers of individuals who
might qualify for assistance needs to be expanded.
      The transformation required in our time is the
globalization of the policy which John Stuart Mill
believed to be necessary in the midst of the squalor of
19th century Britain:  "It is only in the backward
countries of the world that increased production is still
an important object:  in those most advanced, what is
economically needed is a better distribution . . ."  (Mill
1865 v. II: 338).
     Let me return to Sumner Welles' call for an
international organization that assures us of liberty and
not an overlordship, and propose as a closing challenge an
innovation which may have to accompany any major shift
of power to a seemingly more remote authority.
     Vandana Shiva, in her Inaugural Hopper Lecture at
Guelph in September 1993, used the phrase "global
apartheid" to refer to the institutionalization of
inequality  (Shiva 1993: 11-12). But might it suggest

                          [Page 23]

something even more revolutionary to us?  In spring
1994 we  celebrated the holding of free multi-racial
elections in South Africa and its shift to majority rule,
the product of lengthy campaigns both inside and outside
of South Africa.  When will we take the extraordinarily
giant step beyond the three-century old nation-state
dominated system (effectively super-power dominated in
our day) toward free multi-racial elections world-wide?
Is it not monoculture of the mind that leads most of us
to shrink from even entertaining such  a possibility?
     If we embrace universal suffrage at the global level,
several important corollaries emerge.  Those with a
platform for which they want support must labor to
secure it.  Those with concern about the ability of the
newly franchised to exercise that right in a responsible
way develop a changed viewpoint on the question of
extending educational opportunities to those previously
both illiterate and disenfranchised.  The politics of
competing interests replaces the anti-politics of
technical experts and institutional overlords.
     Once we embrace the world as our country, then the
whole set of institutional arrangements that are part and
parcel of a nation state will almost naturally be
extended to the globe, much as Prince-Regent Joao of
Portugal felt obliged to instal a range of previously

                          [Page 24]

neglected civil amenities  in Rio de Janeiro when Rio
became, for a time, the de facto capital of the
Portuguese empire following the  Napoleonic invasion of
the Iberian Peninsula.
     For how much longer will citizens regard
globalization of markets like the weather:  something
that every one talks about, but no one does anything
constructive about to compensate for the human and
environmental fallout of market processes?   What we
must do is discard the implicit blinders in our approach
to economic and social challenges.  Novel problems
demand novel approaches.  So much the better if those
approaches are consistent with our humanitarian values.
     The world has already lost half a century.  And
we may well have missed the bus -- the one opportunity
that we shall have.  When we were able to be generous,
we did so for a time:  there were massive grants by the
U.S. to Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea in the later
1940s and early 1950s, albeit for strategic and not
humanitarian motives.  When we could readily have
afforded to be generous the vision was absent.  Today
may not appear to be the moment for generosity, but that
should not prevent us from working on our designs for a
sustainable future.  The magnitude of the ills facing
global society are such that we should not waste another
minute before beginning the task.

                          [Page 25]

                           Notes

Past-President's Address to the 10th Annual Meeting of
the Canadian Association for the  Study of International
Development, University of Calgary, June 13, 1994  The
author is Associate Professor of Economics at McGill
University, Montreal, Canada.  Correspondence may be
sent to the author at Department of Economics, McGill
University, 855 Sherbrooke St. W., Montreal, Quebec,
Canada  H3A 2T7 by fax 514-398-4938 or by electronic
mail:  inmf@musicb.mcgill.ca

1 "The more backward a country's economy, the greater
was the part played by special institutional factors
designed to increase supply of capital . . ." (Gerschenkron
1962: 354).

2 The possible objection that economists scrupulously
avoid interpersonal comparisons ignores that such
comparisons are at the heart  of both cost-benefit
analysis and the use of consumer surplus and producer
rent in the analysis of tariffs and other policy measures.

3 The concept of an "anti-politics machine" is developed
in Ferguson 1990.   See also  Bunzel 1967.

                          [Page 26]

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